David Lammy offered a striking insight into his thinking in a speech to a United Kingdom think tank recently, promising: “I will take the responsibility of being the first foreign secretary descended from the slave trade incredibly seriously.”
The remark underlined how the man now in charge of both U.K. diplomacy and development policy, following Labour’s decisive election victory, is dramatically different to past holders of a post often seen as the epitome of the country’s elitism and conservatism.
Never before has the job been taken by someone who has thought so deeply about his country’s complicated relationship with the global south, or by someone so shaped by his own family’s painful history under the crimes of the British Empire.